[3] Lazzarato is known for his essay "Immaterial Labor" that appeared in a collection of contemporary Italian political theory edited by Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, called Radical Thought in Italy (1996).

In The Making of the Indebted Man, Lazzarato examines debt as it is experienced by individuals, specifically the subject; he also presents a case that the debtor-creditor relationship is a central category of economics—more important than money or finance, for example.

In the modern economy, it is taken for granted that debts must be repaid, and much of economic activity is driven by lending with the expectation (or: promise) of future repayment.

Making a person capable of keeping a promise means constructing a memory for him, endowing him with interiority, a conscience, which provide a bulwark against forgetting.

The Making of the Indebted Man has proved crucial for the application of the theorizing of neoliberal debt in relation to material culture and contemporary art.

The book is a critique of neoliberalism and governmentality where the latter refers to a form of government which responds to economic demands, a notion closely related to ordoliberalism.

[10] The book's central idea is that basic categories of the economic and political spheres (which are commonly opposed, or spoken of as separate items) are in fact not distinct, but closely related and overlapping.

He advocates for this goal because he attributes responsibility for human suffering during financial crises to capitalists and state actors, and not to any national population.

The violence of taxes and appropriations is the privileged instrument, for only that which inflicts pain is engraved in memory, only that which hurts registers and remains inscribed in consciousness (Nietzsche).In the early 2020s, Lazzarato published another pair of closely related works, centering on the theme of anti-capitalism.

In the above example, the French government sought to maintain control of Algeria, and therefore used the (already existing) technology of radio as a tool to aid this goal.

According to Lazzarato, these forms of labor and oppression are not typically emphasized by classical or orthodox Marxism, which instead focuses on the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in Europe.

According to Lazzarato, the people in these regions could not afford to wait for ideal revolutionary conditions to develop, a notion associated with classical, European Marxism.

The urgency of the here and now meant that revolution could not wait for any technological gap to be filled, or to catch up in terms of development, because the violence, exploitation and misery were intolerable!Toward the end of The Intolerable Present, Lazzarato acknowledges the concept of intersectionality—due to Kimberlé Crenshaw—which posits that an individual may experience multiple forms of discrimination due to simultaneous membership in distinct demographic groups: e.g. a black woman may simultaneously experience racism because she is black, and sexism because she is a woman.

Although Lazzarato acknowledges that the idea of intersectionality is pertinent to his discussion, he expresses preference for the Combahee River Collective Statement, a manifesto issued in 1977 by a group of American black lesbian women.